HODA CODEX: The Story – part 1 – The Lists

Every day I am pleased to see that many players are using the hodacodex.com to improve their gaming experience on Heroes of Dragon Age.
It was in 2014 that I discovered the game, I already knew the Dragon Age license for having played a long time at the game « Dragon Age: Origins » on PC and it’s with pleasure that I found all characters from the series on this mobile version.

Hodacodex – 1st version Excel spreadsheet

While playing, I quickly realized that with the number of heroes available and their varied characteristics, I would have to find a system to sort and filter my heroes. So I started by making a simple Excel spreadsheet.

As I love DATA and I’ve always wanted to share my game experiences with others (as evidenced by my old mobygames account), I decided to put this work online.

I already had a blog on which I published some posts from time to time and I wanted to create a game help section.
At the end of July 2014 I published the 1st version of the hodacodex, in the form of tables.

All only in French and realized using the Tablepress extension for WordPress who allowed me to sort the list.

There were about 230 heroes in this version and all the portraits came from my personal collection.

I continued to update this list but only few players at the time knew the site and especially, the fact that it was only in French greatly limited its impact and its audience, so its purpose.

It was at the beginning of autumn 2014 that I started to retrieve data in English in order to create a bilingual version.
I also wanted to take advantage of this work to discover Javascript or CSS coding practices, so i surfed around the web to take informations and learn.

That’s when I discovered Metafizzy’s Javascript plugin Isotope, it would completely change my vision of the hodacodex.